“No.... How right or how wrong...”
“Dorothea—Dorothea—Dorothea!”
“Shut eyes, Dorotheus—Now I am gone—I am gone!... Farewell, Dorotheus!”
The two were apart, and night was rushing over the desert. Night held, starry and high and still. Then came first light, divinity of dawn in the desert. Dorotheus in his cavern, Dorothea in hers prayed, then ate and drank. Then each took a staff, and the one summoned Arla and the other Even I and Welcome. The sun was not yet up, but the sky was a rose garden. Dorotheus and Dorothea turned their backs upon the oasis, and the one went steadfastly east, and the other west.
CHAPTER XV
THE END OF THE WORLD
Robert le Débonair was King of France, Robert le Diable Duke of Normandy, John XIX Pope in Rome, Héribert bishop of a diocese taking name from a certain town between Orléans and Paris, Rothalind abbess of a great house of Benedictine nuns, Rainulf the Red, baron holding a wide fief and dwelling, when he was not hunting or ravening in war or gone upon some visit with an errand of his own, in the castle above the river. Rainulf was a tiger, a stream in flood, a devastating flame. Mellissent was his wife. Isabel his sister, was gone to be a nun, and was the happier. Gerbert was a music-maker who ate in Rainulf’s hall.
Black Martin was not king nor baron nor bishop, but he ruled his own that was a troop of Entertainers of the time. The time knew much wretchedness and clamoured for crude forgetfulness. Black Martin sold that by the hour, whether in market-place or castle hall or at crossroads when travellers enough gathered themselves together. He was seventy years old and yet strong as an ox. He was dour as an old wolf in winter, and in fight as bad to meet, and he had the cunning of Sire Reynard. He ruled the score of human beings composing his band with more absoluteness than King Robert ruled France. Four of the number were his sons, and four the women with his sons. Two of these were lawful wives, two were not. There were five children in the band. The remainder, all but one, were kindred only because of Adam and Eve, and because their common occupation was to lighten the heart or impart motion to the mind. The remaining one was Gersonde, Black Martin’s granddaughter, child of a dead eldest daughter and some man somewhere. Black Martin’s band included buffoons, tumblers and wrestlers, a dwarf, a dancer, two singers of ballads and players of harps, a man with an ape and a fortune-teller or soothsayer.
That last was the part of Gersonde. She was a dark woman in a red gown with a blue mantle. Now Black Martin beat her, and now he listened to what she said when it came to points upon which he was perplexed. He never listened to her when she wished to stop soothsaying and play and sing with Bageron and Rosamund, or to dance with Maria. If she was insistent he beat her. He was not perplexed here; coin came into the soothsayer’s lap when the singers and players and even the dancer made no collection.
It had been a year of greedy staring, but small, small collections. The lesser folk, serfs and villeins and craftsmen in mean villages or towns, gave nothing at any time unless it were coarse food, or a turn of their trade, or a night’s rest in a dark and crowded hut. This year they did not give the food for it was a famine year. And the burghers in the larger towns gave little, the landed folk gave little, castle court and hall proved saving.
Black Martin spoke to Gersonde. “Soothsay for me! We have had famine years before—”.